Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Emotions as signals
If someone is saying so much that you have lost the thread, stop them kindly and check. Sorry, that is a lot and it matters, can I say back what I have got so far.
It feels rude and it is usually received as the opposite, because it says the words were worth keeping. Listening while quietly drowning helps nobody: you stop taking anything in and they end up talking into a room with no one home. Say it warmly, reflect what you have, and let them correct you. Being corrected is part of it working.
Qur’an and Sunnah
God comes between a man and his heart (Quran 8:24). If even a person's own heart is not fully theirs to survey, guessing at someone else's is optimistic.
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ ٱسۡتَجِيبُواْ لِلَّهِ وَلِلرَّسُولِ إِذَا دَعَاكُمۡ لِمَا يُحۡيِيكُمۡۖ وَٱعۡلَمُوٓاْ أَنَّ ٱللَّهَ يَحُولُ بَيۡنَ ٱلۡمَرۡءِ وَقَلۡبِهِۦ وَأَنَّهُۥٓ إِلَيۡهِ تُحۡشَرُونَ
Believers, respond to God and His Messenger when he calls you to that which gives you life. Know that God comes between a man and his heart, and that you will be gathered to Him
Qur’an 8:24read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A systematic review of the evidence found that although people do sometimes smile when happy or scowl when angry, the match is far too loose to read an emotion reliably off a face, including your own confident readings of somebody else. Which makes asking rather than assuming a fairly practical conclusion. The review is assessing a large and mixed literature, and its point is about the limits of accuracy rather than about faces telling you nothing.
Barrett LF, Adolphs R, Marsella S, Martinez AM, Pollak SD. (2019). Emotional Expressions Reconsidered: Challenges to Inferring Emotion From Human Facial Movements.. Psychological science in the public interest : a journal of the American Psychological Society doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Understanding checked out loud beats understanding assumed, and only one of the two can be corrected.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Go back to the second before you reacted. Not the argument, not the history, just that one second and what crossed you in it.
Emptying the feeling out at somebody does not shift it, and being told what to do instead skips over it. What changes things is feeling it with someone who stays.
I am used to it is not the same as I feel nothing. It usually means a great deal of practice at feeling nothing, and that practice costs something.